Peter Thoeny loves to travel and is fascinated with photography since high school in Switzerland. He first used a simple camera on his trips abroad, then for many years shot manually with a Rollei 35. Film was expensive in those days, and when traveling on a shoestring he had to carefully use and compose the shots. He learned to compose images when he did charcoal drawings and paintings while visi
ting Italy and other places in Europe. Peter now lives in the Silicon Valley for 20 years, and is an instructor at the Digital Photo Academy teaching photography in the San Francisco Bay Area. He mostly uses Sony mirror-less cameras with a variety of lenses, including a vintage 50mm f0.95 Dream Lens. He usually takes bracketed exposures and processes RAW images to get most out of a camera. Peter uses Photomatix Pro for HDR processing, and Pixelmator Pro for final touches on a MacBook Pro. "Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution." ~ Ansel Adams
Inspired by this quote, Peter strives to compose photos that tell a story and evoke emotions. His motto is 20% gear, 40% composition, 40% post-processing. Peter specializes in quality HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography, which is his passion for the last 8 years. He uses HDR processing mainly to work around the technical limitations of cameras by carefully post-processing images with the goal to reconstruct the feeling and the emotions he had while experiencing the scene. His images don't have this typical "HDR look" - most of the time you can't even tell they are HDR processed. The main purpose of the processing is to be able to look at an image on screen or print, and see what the human eyes actually saw out in the field. The best cameras, screens and prints are still no match to the quality of human eyes.
